Winter's Curse

by Mary Stone

  “Ma’am,” the security guard said, looking at Heidi hard, his eyes narrowed. “You have something…” He gestured vaguely to the left side of his neck.

  She put her hand automatically to where he’d indicated. Her fingertips came away dark with a sticky, half-dried smear of Richard Covington’s blood. She looked back up at the security guard just as his hand went to the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Behind him, across the long stretch of the lobby, she saw the elevator operator’s eyes widen as she wrenched loose of Ryan’s grip and pulled out her gun. She’d taken off the silencer, and the report of the weapon echoed at full volume in the marble-accented lobby.

  The elevator operator had disappeared to the side, likely punching buttons, praying for the door to close as his co-worker collapsed to the floor with two holes in his chest. In the guard’s outstretched hand, he held a tissue, slightly crumpled.

  She started to move toward the elevator, eliminate the other witness, but Ryan caught her arm again.

  “No,” he demanded, his face pale beneath the makeup. “The car is waiting.”

  She recoiled from him in disgust and fury and turned back to the elevator. She didn’t have time for weakness.

  The elevator doors had closed again. She’d missed her chance.

  Heidi rounded on Ryan, grabbing a handful of his shirt and pressing the barrel of the Ruger against the underside of his chin.

  Her breath came in short, furious gasps. “I’m in charge. Not you.”

  He nodded, flinching as his skin met the hot metal. She knew he was scared as piss, and she reveled in that, but he didn’t break eye contact. “You’re in charge, but our ride is right there. You could kill the elevator guy, but someone else would come, and you’d have to off them too. It would take more time we don’t have. Let it go.”

  She hated it, and him, but he was right.

  She let him go and grabbed the handle of the rolling suitcase.

  It was time to head to the safe house. Recalibrate again, if necessary. The next phase couldn’t go like this. It had to be perfect.

  She took a steadying breath. It was all about control.

  12

  Sun left Winter in her hotel room, shutting the door quietly behind her. Winter had been silent the entire way back to San Clemente, and Sun didn’t blame her. She didn’t feel like talking, either.

  There was no word yet about Sheriff Marchwood’s condition. She’d spoken with the undersheriff when they’d returned to the hotel. The sheriff had still been unresponsive when they’d taken her to the hospital. Thanks to Winter, though, her heart had been beating again, and she’d finally started breathing on her own. She’d been taken to the hospital in Los Angeles with a state-of-the-art burn unit. Detective Patterson was missing, presumed dead.

  She’d call later for more updates, she decided, and put the casualties aside. Right now, she was busy wallowing in self-disgust. She didn’t tolerate weakness in others, but today, she’d been failed by her own.

  During her time with the FBI, Sun had cultivated a deliberate reputation as a take-no-prisoners bitch with a temper, but also with a sharp mind and an even-headed approach in all circumstances. Today, she’d lost that. She’d been as ineffectual as a fresh-out-of-Quantico rookie agent in training.

  Actually, worse than that. Winter, the rook, had stepped up and handled everything while Sun had been frozen in indecision. At least she hadn’t passed out, she thought grimly.

  It was lowering to admit. And even though she was beginning to respect Winter as a capable agent, a larger part of her was jealous.

  Sun grabbed the remote from the bedside table and flicked the TV on. A mindless sitcom blasted out, and she punched the sound down with angry jabs at the volume button. Flipping through the stations to CNN, she lay back on the pillows. She’d give Winter some time to recover, and then they’d get back to the case. With any possible clues destroyed in the house explosion, they needed a breakthrough at this point.

  Maybe her wunderkind partner would provide something, she thought bitterly.

  While Jake Tapper rambled on about the latest scandal in the White House, she read the ticker tape of breaking news at the bottom of the screen without really paying attention. There was always breaking news. The media didn’t even deal in non-breaking news at this point.

  But the next chyron caught her attention.

  The Phoenix Hotel in New York City had been robbed. Several were dead, including two hotel guests and a long-time resident. Two bodyguards and a security guard had also been killed when two suspects had attempted to leave the building before dawn. They’d gotten away.

  The Phoenix Hotel. Site of another high-profile robbery back in the 1970s. Her stomach clenched as she muted the TV and pulled up her laptop. She pulled up her personal Gmail address. Just as she’d expected, there was a message waiting for her. Sent from an encrypted email, just like the one she’d received right after the San Clemente robbery, it contained just a few terse words:

  Oops. Too slow.

  Furious, she called Max Osbourne.

  “Sun,” he answered right away, his gravel-rough voice more grating than usual. “I was just picking up the phone to call you. What’s the status there? Any word on Sheriff Marchwood?”

  “Not yet. But I’m calling about something else. The Phoenix Hotel robbery. Did you hear about it?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Sounds like one of the guests killed was a minor Saudi prince. They think it was a politically motivated attack and the other guests were killed to make it look like a robbery.”

  “It’s not.” Her tone was urgent. Tight. “We’re dealing with the same killers. It’s tied to this case.”

  “That’s a big stretch,” he answered, his tone skeptical. “Just like it was a big stretch to say that the San Clemente robbery was some tip-of-the-iceberg thing.”

  Sun had already gotten off the bed and was throwing things back in her suitcase. “No. This just backs up my theory,” she insisted. “The Phoenix was burglarized in the seventies. The thieves had a record-setting take, and it went down in the books as the biggest hotel robbery of all time. This is not a coincidence.”

  She couldn’t tell him about the encrypted emails. She needed this win. She’d be on the fast-track up the FBI corporate ladder, not stopping until she reached the top.

  It took ten more minutes of fast talking to convince Max that she had a connection, flimsy as it might sound. “So you just want to leave things there?” He was incredulous. “You’ve been there for three days now, working this case. Now, you have one dead cop and another who might well be dying, and you just want to pack up and fly to New York?”

  “Look, I know it sounds crazy,” Sun tried to keep her voice even and persuasive, “but I know I’m right. You’ve never had reason to doubt me before. Things are covered here. Let me…” She paused, correcting herself. “Let us follow up on this. I promise you, I’m right. Agent Black agrees with me and is fully on board.”

  In her imagination, she crossed her fingers at the lie. But, in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  He was silent for a long moment.

  “Fine. Book a flight out. I’m assigning you two more agents. The San Clemente robbery was bad, but this one is huge. You’ll have to work things out with the NYPD. They’re expecting Feds, but they’re still not going to be happy when you show up with wild theories. This is a potential political hotbed. Relations with Saudi Arabia aren’t good right now anyway, and the prince’s murder will only add more fuel to that fire. Come back here to regroup first, and I’ll have Dalton and Durham briefed and ready to assist.”

  “Thanks, Max.”

  She hung up and grabbed her hastily packed suitcase, heading next door. Winter needed rest, but Sun decided that the rookie could get it when they were in the air. She’d been given a second message, straight from the suspects. She was smart enough to handle it. This was going to make her.

  Winter was still in bed,
looking exhausted when Sun entered the room, but she sat up fast.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “I heard you talking to Max.”

  “We’ve got to go. We’re heading back to Richmond and then New York. There’s been another hit, and I’m positive we’re dealing with the same people.”

  Winter didn’t question her, which Sun was grateful for. She was going to have a hard enough time getting everyone else on board. But she knew in her gut, with absolute certainty, that this was just the second hit. New York was where their suspects were. They had to find them before they moved on to their next target. Or figure out what they had planned for their next move. No more reactivity. They had to get ahead of them.

  She was going to bring them down before they had a chance to send a third email.

  Winter was exhausted. She’d wanted nothing more than to lay in bed and sleep until she could get the incident with Shannon Marchwood out of her mind. But Sun hadn’t been willing to take no for an answer. She’d been frenetic. Intense. There’d been no more awkward sympathy. Even the growing feeling of camaraderie between them had disappeared.

  The old Sun was back.

  Winter had to wonder why. Why the sudden urgency? Why the complete one-eighty in the woman’s attitude? There was something wrong with Sun’s relationship to this case, but she was too tired to figure it out now.

  The wait at the airline had been blessedly short, which had worked in Winter’s favor. In addition, Sun had been bumped from business class, and it was fun to see the airline employees not even bat an eyelash at Sun’s temper tantrum.

  Not in Winter’s favor was the fact that they were seated together, and Sun had demanded the window seat. Any other day, Winter would have taken that challenge head-on and told her aisle or latrine and made her pick one.

  For the sake of her own sanity, she’d let Sun have her way, hoping the woman would just leave her alone.

  Once they’d boarded, taken off and hit cruising altitude, Sun pulled up her laptop and went to work right away. Winter had just lain her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. After a few moments, though, Sun jostled her arm. Her eyes were bright and sharp.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to the screen. “The Phoenix Hotel Robbery. Biggest U.S. robbery in the history books.”

  Sighing, Winter read over her shoulder for a moment. Long enough to get the gist of the story. She resigned herself to the idea that sleep wouldn’t come for her until Sun got whatever she had to say out of her system.

  “Okay. Like the San Clemente, I can kind of see it. But how did they get across the country and arrange to rob one of the most luxurious hotels in New York City in just a couple of days?”

  Sun shrugged. “Advance planning. This is just the second step. We have to figure out what the third one is and be waiting for them. That’s going to be the tricky part.”

  “So, we just look at the highest-profile heists of the twentieth century and post up officers at every possible location they could hit? I don’t know how feasible that sounds. Especially in just a couple of days.”

  “Max is giving me Dalton and Durham to add to the team. John Durham’s a useless sack of shit who should have been fired years ago, but Dalton could be helpful.”

  Noah would absolutely be helpful. Winter didn’t know much about John Durham. Bull, they called him. She’d never spent any time with the guy before. All she knew about him was that he was older, close to retirement, and built like a fireplug with a bald, bullet-shaped head. That, and he liked to tell dirty jokes and look at girls’ legs while damning the entire concept of political correctness.

  At least there would be two more people to blunt Sun’s attention. And Noah was one of them, which meant she’d have an ally.

  “Whatever. Your case,” Winter reminded her. There’d never been any ambiguity about that. “I’m going to sleep. Wake me up when we’re almost there.”

  Sun didn’t reply. She was back in laptop land.

  Winter closed her eyes again, trying to tune out the sound of a crying baby a few aisles behind them. And the fingers hitting the keyboard next to her with machine-gun speed. Her head was pounding, but not in a migraine way. She winced at the wet-sounding cough of a woman in the center aisle.

  She just wanted to crawl under the covers of a bed somewhere and stay there for a week. In the absence of a bed, she wanted to sleep the rest of the non-stop flight to Virginia.

  I’d been thinking a lot about my girlie lately. I took a swig from the bottle next to my La-Z-Boy armchair. The liquor felt good going down. I’d liked seeing her in Harrisonburg. And now that I’d had some time to reflect upon the matter, I liked knowing that she’d grown up and gone into the FBI.

  It was almost like I could take credit for that. If I hadn’t chosen her mother for retribution and saved the brother from a life of sin, my little girlie would have likely grown up to be a hairdresser or model, or entered some other useless female career. In fact, you could say I’d done her a favor.

  Created her. Shaped her. Molded her.

  I held up my hands. Hands that had molded many, many lives.

  Hands that had righted the world.

  The talking heads on the TV chattered back and forth, arguing about the new tax bill Congress was trying to push through. Damned heathens, always trying to bleed the little guy dry. As if the government didn’t take enough of our hard-earned money.

  The news story changed without warning, focusing on a breaking story out of New York. A robbery at some hoity-toity hotel. A bunch of rich people killed. Sons of bitches probably deserved it. Spending all kinds of money to stay at a fancy place like that. One room likely cost more to rent in a night than my house payment used to cost for the whole month.

  Rich people didn’t deserve to live anyway. A few gone was no big loss.

  You cannot serve God and money, the good book said. I’d written it precisely to warn these foolish people. But did they listen? No. They did not. It seemed they never did.

  I perked up a little when they said some middle-eastern prince had been killed. That was interesting. I didn’t care much for foreigners and could care even less about a dead Arab guy, but a big international incident like that? So close to Virginia where my girlie was working? Maybe she’d get assigned to the case. She was a good FBI agent. Real smart.

  Because of me.

  Maybe she’d do a press conference, like for the thing in Harrisonburg, and I’d get to see her pretty face again. She hadn’t talked the last time, just stood in the background with that serious look on her face like she always had. But she looked good on TV. All serious and sober in her black FBI suit, with that long black hair tucked back in a braid, and those spooky blue eyes of hers taking in everything that was going on around her.

  Yep, my girlie was a picture, all right. Pretty as anything, just like her momma had been.

  Was she a sinner too? She had to be. They all were. Anger stirred inside me as I wondered how many of my commandments my little girlie had broken.

  Or maybe she was just too busy to get in much trouble. So busy, it almost made me feel lazy. I’d been retired now for more than ten years…not from the work that paid the bills, but from the work that made up my calling. Maybe it was time for me to get back to it.

  Yeah, I thought, watching the coverage of the hotel robbery. Maybe it was time to begin ridding the world of sin once again. Do some good. I’d gotten complacent.

  Even as the thoughts of issuing my warning to the world stirred inside me, the hunger for sin cleansing grew. My girlie wouldn’t understand my calling. She, like all the other ones who followed man’s laws, didn’t.

  She’d think I was wrong. She’d want to catch me.

  Maybe I’d let her. That could be fun.

  It’d be nice to see her again, face-to-face, all grown up. After all these years, I was sure she had some questions that only I could answer. If she behaved real nice, I’d maybe share some secrets she’d probably wondered about. We could have a li
ttle one-on-one time, and I could see all that pretty white skin of hers, with that dark hair spread against it, just like her momma’s.

  Then, I’d rid her of her sins too.

  Mother.

  Daughter.

  It would complete the circle, and maybe this time, the world would listen to my message.

  Listen to me.

  13

  Noah had been thinking about Winter the last couple of days, wondering how she was getting along with Sun. When the two of them walked into the office, Sun laser-focused and waspish, Winter looking tired and pale, he figured he had his answer.

  “Dalton, Durham, in the conference room, now.” Sun was strident, heading for the briefing room without stopping.

  Winter trailed behind her, giving him a small smile and a wave as she passed. It was a smug smile that clearly said, Now she’s your problem too.

  He grabbed his notebook and followed Bull Durham’s stocky frame.

  “All right,” Sun said before they could even sit down. “We’ve got a related case. Our suspects from the San Clemente bank robbery have moved on to The Phoenix Hotel in New York. Several people are dead, two of them robbed.”

  Her eyes lit with glee, which struck him as wildly inappropriate, considering her previous statement.

  “One detail is being kept from the press. We have a witness. Charlotte Edwards, an elderly woman who has been staying at the hotel for years, survived. We’re going to New York now to question her. Anyone have anything to add?”

  Noah raised a finger. “How do we know the two incidents are connected?”

  Sun’s eyes warmed just a little as she looked at him.

  Damn. He wanted to groan. He’d been picking up a few vibes that she was interested in him but hadn’t done anything to encourage her, hoping he’d imagined them. His interest just didn’t lie in a workplace romance. He glanced at Winter. Mostly.